CR-10S + Duet Wifi: Print Quality Issues

I recently purchased a Duet Wifi to upgrade one of my modded CR-10S printers. The mechanics of the machines are stock, but they both have a genuine E3D V6 hot-end, a Petsfang cooler assembly and the differential IR sensor from dc42. All of these were present when using the original Creality board which was running Marlin 1.1.9 and controlled by Octoprint.

The previous setup had great print quality, and I had also been using features such as Mesh Bed leveling, Linear Advance, etc, etc. I decided to switch over to the Duet Wifi because of its incredible feature set (which I already love!), as well as feeling like I was making an investment that could be used on other printers in the future.

Thus far I have everything working. All the axes work as expected, end-stops trigger, the IR sensor works. Homing, leveling, bed and nozzle heating all work as expected. My issue is that I cannot solve the print quality problems I am experiencing. I will provide pictures below, but it looks like the extrusion is very inconsistent or "noisy" on the X and Y sides of the test object, I'm not sure how better to describe it. Printing a single layer seems fine, so I'm unsure if my guess about it being something with the extruder stepper is on the mark or not.

I slice using Simplify3D and have tried tweaking every possible feature I can think of over the past 3 days, but nothing has had an effect on the issue. Between S3D and the Duet configuration, I have tried the following without success:

As you can see, I'm a little out of ideas. If anyone has further ideas of things to try, I'm all ears! My next step would be trying a different stepper on the extruder as I've read the stock CR-10 ones are low amperage high inductance which isn't ideal. The extruder set-up is the standard CR-10S design of a MK9 non-geared stepper running into a bowden tube.

The following pictures show 2 XYZ test cubes. The one on the left was printed prior to any tweaking, not long after everything had been tested. The one on the right is as things stand now, though I should point out most of the change came from tweaking retraction, hence the reduction of over-extrusion at the corners. The pattern on the sides is a little reduced, but still far from the quality when the printer was running the original 8-bit board with Marlin.

It would be helpful to see a calibration cube printed before you did the conversion, and also your Marlin and Duet config settings so that we can see whether you have changed any speeds, accelerations etc.

@dc42 I, unfortunately, don't have a calibration cube from prior to the conversion, but I do have a second CR-10S that is configured identically (with the exception of the Z-probe) to this one, pre-conversion of course. They both ran the same build of the firmware, same mods, etc.

As for the Marlin config I was / am using, all the feed rates, speeds, jerk, etc are all the default:

I admit that most of the settings regarding speeds & jerk were based upon other people who had done the conversion for a CR-10S, not calculated from my Marlin configuration. Rather than in-line my full Marlin config here, I've chucked it up on Github: https://gist.github.com/nexx/2e5d44e1eea566e27b831a9f222a8131

So you have the same acceleration and jerk configured in both (allowing for jerk being in mm/min for RRF and in mm/sec for Marlin), however you have substantially higher maximum speeds (feedrate) configured in M203 than you had in Marlin.

So you have the same acceleration and jerk configured in both (allowing for jerk being in mm/min for RRF and in mm/sec for Marlin), however you have substantially higher maximum speeds (feedrate) configured in M203 than you had in Marlin.

As far as I can tell, the max feedrate in Marlin is in mm/s, and RRF is in mm/min, so wouldn't that make the Marlin ones actually much higher? (150000, 150000, 6000, 1500)? I know the Z movement speed on my CR-10 maxes out at around 1200mm/min before it starts to bind or skip.

I'm sorry, it's impossible for me to compare the photos because they are of different faces and taken at different distances. Can you take a photo of a print of the X face from a Duet print, at the same scale as your Marlin print?

Also please post your Duet config.g file and the Marlin settings you were using.

Now I can't publish the same photo, because I remade the plugs for the duet. At the moment I am working on replacing wires and connectors so that both boards can be connected. As soon as I finish, I will publish all the comparisons. (files, photos, etc.)

@denis Sorry, yeah. I ended up solving the issue by replacing the extruder entirely. I'm now running a Bondtech BMG extruder and prints are now the same between Marlin and Duet. Not the answer you're looking for, but I had tried everything else prior to this.